Tag: wavetable synthesis

Two new experimental tracks from rreplay are available. Pop the player out in the background here and come back to read while you give them a listen.

They are from the more experimental end of our stuff. I think I was having a hard drive problem and had to use a bunch of stuff I don’t normally use for jamming, and we had no drum loops. The first, short piece is modem and dial tone sounds worked through a sampler that I played via my guitar. The second uses chipsounds and something called scanned synthesis. One of the big breakthroughs in the 1980s synth scene was wavetable synthesis, where you could construct one cycle of a sound wave of any shape you desired, load it into memory, and then play it at any pitch. While it opened up new possibilities for synthesis, it also had its limits, the most telling being that the wavetable is static, while the timbre and thus waveshape of acoustic instruments varies over time. Scanned synthesis (pdf) attacks this problem by having the wavetable change over time using shifts to the wavetable so that the sound evolves. The shifts are slow vibrations that vary over time, modelled on struck, plucked, and bowed vibrating objects (like a string, for example), and lately on multi-dimensional creations that exist in more than four dimensions. The result is much livelier, natural sounding synth where the tone evolves with the playing. Strings are actually a lively area of math and theoretical physics work right now, and I think some of the concepts from string theory are working their way into the synthesis method (pdf).

As usual, lots more to listen too at way.music. Please give us a listen.